The stigma with Flash was it provided a lot of interesting opportunites in terms of the way websites interact with users, but it ended up being seen as a tool to create ever-more obnoxious Hamsterdance animations. ...as can be seen in the comments here whenever something Flash related gets posted.
That said, what bothers me the most about Flash isn't necessarily how it's applied, but the cultural aspect of it. Flash is a complete break with the egalitarian history of the web and how web developers learned their stuff. Call me a commie, but one of the main reasons why the internet took off back in the mid 90's was because the spec was open, many of the tools for viewing and creating (and even hosting) content were free, and if you wanted to learn html all you had to do was go to some good sites, select "View Source", and see how other people did what you wanted to do.
Yes, I remember these days. However, there are a plethora of tutorials freely available, and the binary format saves a lot of bandwidth.
I agree that open formats were very important for the Internet to take off, and they still are important for many applications today. However, it's a two edged sword. I'm quite sure that, had it be an open (as opposed to openly documented, as it is now) standard, there would have been some vendor or another who would have had a player integrated with its operating system that would work about like the other, but not quite.
With Flash, all that is broken. Macromedia piggy-backed on a ubuiqitous platform -- made so by free tools and open standards -- hooked users on visuals that rivaled anything on the web before.... and then slapped an $800 price tag on the authoring tools. Bastards.
So they're making money with it. Good for them. They employ many programmers, and have to pay them somehow. You can hardly blame them to have come up with a successful product.
They develop the player and give it to the consumers for free. The ones paying for the licenses are the ones who make money by developing for the infrastructure Macromedia created. Other companies came up with products which can export SWFs, too, and now there is a free, open alternative.
You just wait: if the OSS crowd creates design tools that are 1/10th as good as Flash MX, I promise you'll see a massive price drop, or a free "Flash MX Lite". Just like how MySql prompted SQL Server Express from M$.
I'd like to see such a tool, too. If Inkscrape could export SWFs, we'd be almost there.
I must say, though, that your last paragraph gave me the impression that what you really want is free, not necessarily open software.
I have just commented on this here, but this thread seems to be more appropriate, so here goes:
Good, you found MTASC already. It was a huge boost to the OS Flash community, and there now is a wiki where you will find everything you need.
No, there is no GUI, if that's what you're looking for. You will have to use XML to describe your SWF. But there is an Eclipse plugin, and MTASC integrates nicely with it. Currently, what would be needed is a good SVG to SWF converter for the graphics, but I'm sure this could be done. You can already create an SWF with TTF fonts, PNGs, JPEGs and existing SWFs in it if you're not scared of XML. In theory, you could even draw vector graphics in XML and have them converted, but this would be at a very low level. If you're now thinking that SVG is vectors in XML, so an XSLT transform could take care of that, you're mostly right if it wasn't for the CSS in SVG.
As far as the GUI you're asking for is concerned, that's still a very far way to go of course, but if you want code-centric SWF development you can get a great environment already -- actually, if that is your approach to making SWFs I'd say you're better off with Open Source tools now than you would be with the more designer centric original Flash IDE.
Check out osflash.org.
The Open Source Flash community is really taking off these days. You can create SWFs without any need for commercial products.
There's an Open Source Eclipse Plugin for ActionScript2 (ECMA262 v4 based, classes, interfaces, typing...), and you can use Ant to convert an XML to SWF with an OS tool, and then have your code compiled into it with an OS compiler.
well... the SWF file format specification is available. there is an open source compiler i'm happily using, an eclipseplugin and other useful tools to build SWFs you can then compile your code into.
what's left is the player, but there are someprojects to build one, too.
not these, but i've seen a model from these guys on a fair in helsinki in late 1999. i always thought it would be nice to have a 3d display that worked without glasses, and all of a sudden i found myself standing right in front of one. it was quite impressive, good image quality and yes, a convincing effect. only when i moved my head it took a very short moment to retrack my eyes and readjust the prisms (there are prisms in front of each vertical pixel row. they direct the light so that one eye sees the even and the other the odd numbered pixel columns). the guy peresenting it told me they had played quake III on it:)
i came across their displays again on cebit a few years later, there also were some by the fraunhofer institute (the ones i've seen are probably not on the page, they had one or two that tracked your eyes and adjusted to your position, and one that only worked at a specific position, iirc).
anyway, while searching for the seereal link above, i came across this list of 3d displays, there even are price quotes for a few.
thanks to the AS2 Plugin and the open source compiler i can now code in eclipse, too. hooray!
unfortunately flashout, which displays the newly compiled SWF inside eclipse and logs the debug output seems to work only under windows. linux and osX users have to use their browser and a custom solution for the debug info.
i love my new workflow. it's so much better than having flash open in another window only to compile my classes.
Have you tried it? Much better than Fosters any day.
as a german who has been to australia, i have to say that e.g. James Boag's is an excellent beer, and they have several others which are pretty good. Fosters only gets exported in huge amounts because nobody drinks it in australia.
if you like good beer a trip to australia won't disappoint you.
I'll take German beer over a tropical vacation.
if somebody ever offers you a tropical vacation, let me know and i'll swap for a case of german beer.
the collaborating thing would work either by loading their artworks as swfs or jpgs into your main swf, and manipulate it by script (visibility, position, things like that), or by giving them instructions how to name instances in the swf and later compiling your code into it. this way you would have only one swf (you could have more if you wanted, though), and the designers could work with flash like they're used to.
you can't wrap MTASC into a flash movie and use it as a GUI, however you could have something inbetween an swf and MTASC that you communicate with by, e.g., sending xml over a socket connection. that thing could also include other assets, like the graphics and such, into the swf. the swf file format specification can be downloaded on the macromedia site, it's well documented.
i'm not sure, but it might be possible to include the FlashPlayer in Eclipse somehow, after all it uses the netscape plugin standart. if somebody could set up something like the perfect environment for working with MTASC, that would be great.:)
learning to make swfs without the flash IDE is difficult, i guess. if you have access to windows or a mac, downloading the trial version from macromedia seems like your best option.
i'm not sure about what kind of imported projects you're talking about? there are some public domain flas (fla is the format the flash IDE saves the projects in, the graphics and such, can contain script, too), but that's a proprietary format and you can't open it anywhere else.
while it's possible to make an swf entirely in script and loading things like graphics into it, it's not exactly convenient and i imagine having to learn like this would be extremely frustrating. maybe KineticFusion, a swf to XML compiler/decompiler could be of some help. they have a free-as-in-beer version, but it only understands ActionScript 1 (no typing, no classfiles, interfaces and such). you could, however, experiment with it by dissecting some simple swfs, building your own, and then start compiling AS2 into it with MTASC. i had to google it because i forgot the name, and came across this, maybe they have something of use, too.
debugging without the flash IDE can be difficult, because obviously you can't use their debugger. there are ways of debugging anyway, iirc there was a short discussion about it on the mailing list. check the archives or just subscribe and ask -- i think there might be more people interested in avoiding the macromedia IDE completely, but so far pretty much everybody using MTASC has a strong background in AS2 development and access to the flash IDE when needed.
well, there's flirt. it's still in an early stage, so you can't run any swf off the web that makes excessive use of scripting, but it's possible to write swfs keeping its limitations in mind. i think it's a promising attempt, given some time.
on the development side, there's MTASC, an open source ActionScript 2 (typing, classes...) compiler. lot's of programs can export swfs for graphics to go with the code you write with it.
Not voting is a perfectly reasonable stance. If you believe that no one man should have the authority to unleash death and destruction upon the world, why would you pick one guy over the other simply because he will cut your taxes or give you free health care?
no, it's not reasonable. just because you don't vote, it doesn't mean you don't get a president.
it's like those weird book clubs, where they just send you some crap other people buy if you don't order something each quater year.
Please keep in mind that this is the most important election of our lifetime(s).
no, in the most important election of your lifetime there only will be the votes of nine supreme court judges a couple weeks later.
this is not to say people shouldn't vote. please, do. even if you live in a state that leans strongly towards one candidate, we non-US citizens could still give you credit for the popular vote should bush win.
Now I don't only pay the fscking music industry money for the cds I do my backups on (a certain amount of every blank cd you buy goes to the music industry, can you believe it)
you make backups on the blanks for music that have the GEMA fee added to their price? i pay 35 cents for my data cd blanks, and they come in cases.
besides, GEMA is a completely different organisation (distributes money to musicians), and has nothing to do with the GEZ (collects the fees for public broadcasting).
I'll also have to pay for my computer I certainly don't use to watch public broadcasting tv
the idea behind the fees -- for computers or not -- is to guarantee the existance of an independent news coverage. this is always nice to have, but the important thing is that it's there when there are no alternatives left. think of it as a fee for your independent media insurence (hey, that's pretty clever. that's how they should advertise it, not those incredibly stupid ads they run now. i'd better trade mark it, so i can cash in when they get the idea).
On top of that, not only do I have to pay, but every frigging company with a internet connection will have to pay the fee for every computer connected to the net, this is just insane.
do they? i thought they pay for a bulk license, and often pay for tv and radio anyway.
that said, i don't like the idea either. i don't watch tv, and i have no radio. i do, however, watch the evening news over the net. it's 300kb/s, so it goes well on full screen.
of course, now that i have to pay my independent media insurence (think positive) anyway, i certainly expect them to further expand their news and cultural offerings on the web. i'll be officially part of their audience then, and i demand something for my money.
Seriously, they can't even get to *Earth's* orbit, and they are planning to go to Mars?
they have sent up private amateur radio satellites into earth orbit for years using some spare space in ESAs arianes since 1980.
they're a rather large group of scientists who work on the project for free in their spare time.
So the "dictatorship of the proletarians" is nothing about a political system?
afaik, the dictatorship of the proletariat is only a preparation for communism.
but still, you're right, it includes a political system that goes with the economic system.
Another thing that will draw the congresscritters to muck about with copyright (as if the induce act wasn't bad enough). I'm sure that one of the RIAA's checks is being written out right now with the note: "See we have to fix this whole limited time loophole or the evil pirates/terrorists will jeopardize our business model"
i think you meant to say that the story was a dupe.
Here he is in all his glory ladies and gentlemen, the Google-scholar.
unfortunately it is impossible to remember all the racist crap that was said throughout history.
but fyi: my other reply to your revisionist post further up was completely out of memory. i'm german, so i don't need a spell checker to know how to spell "Nationalsozialismus".
do you have any comments on that?
I'll refer you to Johannes Stark's Nationalsocialismus und Wissenschaft (1934).
a quick search on him revealed that he tried to differ between "jewish physics" (theroretical) and "arayan physics" (experimental).
he also referred to heisenberg and planck as "white jews".
i'm also pretty sure he would have spelled "Nationalsozialismus" with a "z".
To them, the mastry of wordly and materialistic was a paramount in the judging of a man's worth.
nonsense.
being a member of the "master race" was inherited by "blood".
there were tests based on physical characteristics to determine the percentage of "purity".
Funny... until flat screen televisions came out, 99.99% of all video was "projected" onto curved surfaces.
maybe the headline was misleading for people who don't RTFA.
it's about projecting on irregular surfaces with irregular coloring, without expensive technology.
Slashdot Mirror
here's one and another.
there's plenty more.
That said, what bothers me the most about Flash isn't necessarily how it's applied, but the cultural aspect of it. Flash is a complete break with the egalitarian history of the web and how web developers learned their stuff. Call me a commie, but one of the main reasons why the internet took off back in the mid 90's was because the spec was open, many of the tools for viewing and creating (and even hosting) content were free, and if you wanted to learn html all you had to do was go to some good sites, select "View Source", and see how other people did what you wanted to do.
Yes, I remember these days. However, there are a plethora of tutorials freely available, and the binary format saves a lot of bandwidth.
I agree that open formats were very important for the Internet to take off, and they still are important for many applications today. However, it's a two edged sword. I'm quite sure that, had it be an open (as opposed to openly documented, as it is now) standard, there would have been some vendor or another who would have had a player integrated with its operating system that would work about like the other, but not quite.
With Flash, all that is broken. Macromedia piggy-backed on a ubuiqitous platform -- made so by free tools and open standards -- hooked users on visuals that rivaled anything on the web before.... and then slapped an $800 price tag on the authoring tools. Bastards.
So they're making money with it. Good for them. They employ many programmers, and have to pay them somehow. You can hardly blame them to have come up with a successful product.
They develop the player and give it to the consumers for free. The ones paying for the licenses are the ones who make money by developing for the infrastructure Macromedia created. Other companies came up with products which can export SWFs, too, and now there is a free, open alternative.
You just wait: if the OSS crowd creates design tools that are 1/10th as good as Flash MX, I promise you'll see a massive price drop, or a free "Flash MX Lite". Just like how MySql prompted SQL Server Express from M$.
I'd like to see such a tool, too. If Inkscrape could export SWFs, we'd be almost there.
I must say, though, that your last paragraph gave me the impression that what you really want is free, not necessarily open software.
Good, you found MTASC already. It was a huge boost to the OS Flash community, and there now is a wiki where you will find everything you need.
No, there is no GUI, if that's what you're looking for. You will have to use XML to describe your SWF. But there is an Eclipse plugin, and MTASC integrates nicely with it. Currently, what would be needed is a good SVG to SWF converter for the graphics, but I'm sure this could be done. You can already create an SWF with TTF fonts, PNGs, JPEGs and existing SWFs in it if you're not scared of XML. In theory, you could even draw vector graphics in XML and have them converted, but this would be at a very low level. If you're now thinking that SVG is vectors in XML, so an XSLT transform could take care of that, you're mostly right if it wasn't for the CSS in SVG.
As far as the GUI you're asking for is concerned, that's still a very far way to go of course, but if you want code-centric SWF development you can get a great environment already -- actually, if that is your approach to making SWFs I'd say you're better off with Open Source tools now than you would be with the more designer centric original Flash IDE.
Check out osflash.org.
The Open Source Flash community is really taking off these days. You can create SWFs without any need for commercial products.
There's an Open Source Eclipse Plugin for ActionScript2 (ECMA262 v4 based, classes, interfaces, typing...), and you can use Ant to convert an XML to SWF with an OS tool, and then have your code compiled into it with an OS compiler.
what's left is the player, but there are some projects to build one, too.
not these, but i've seen a model from these guys on a fair in helsinki in late 1999. i always thought it would be nice to have a 3d display that worked without glasses, and all of a sudden i found myself standing right in front of one. it was quite impressive, good image quality and yes, a convincing effect. only when i moved my head it took a very short moment to retrack my eyes and readjust the prisms (there are prisms in front of each vertical pixel row. they direct the light so that one eye sees the even and the other the odd numbered pixel columns). the guy peresenting it told me they had played quake III on it :)
i came across their displays again on cebit a few years later, there also were some by the fraunhofer institute (the ones i've seen are probably not on the page, they had one or two that tracked your eyes and adjusted to your position, and one that only worked at a specific position, iirc).
anyway, while searching for the seereal link above, i came across this list of 3d displays, there even are price quotes for a few.
unfortunately flashout, which displays the newly compiled SWF inside eclipse and logs the debug output seems to work only under windows. linux and osX users have to use their browser and a custom solution for the debug info.
i love my new workflow. it's so much better than having flash open in another window only to compile my classes.
for scripting, you can use eclipse with the AS Development Tool, flashout and MTASC as the compiler. there are commercial products, too.
well, this isn't full blown yet, but it's a good start.
as a german who has been to australia, i have to say that e.g. James Boag's is an excellent beer, and they have several others which are pretty good. Fosters only gets exported in huge amounts because nobody drinks it in australia.
if you like good beer a trip to australia won't disappoint you.
I'll take German beer over a tropical vacation.
if somebody ever offers you a tropical vacation, let me know and i'll swap for a case of german beer.
the collaborating thing would work either by loading their artworks as swfs or jpgs into your main swf, and manipulate it by script (visibility, position, things like that), or by giving them instructions how to name instances in the swf and later compiling your code into it. this way you would have only one swf (you could have more if you wanted, though), and the designers could work with flash like they're used to. :)
you can't wrap MTASC into a flash movie and use it as a GUI, however you could have something inbetween an swf and MTASC that you communicate with by, e.g., sending xml over a socket connection. that thing could also include other assets, like the graphics and such, into the swf. the swf file format specification can be downloaded on the macromedia site, it's well documented.
i'm not sure, but it might be possible to include the FlashPlayer in Eclipse somehow, after all it uses the netscape plugin standart. if somebody could set up something like the perfect environment for working with MTASC, that would be great.
i'm not sure about what kind of imported projects you're talking about? there are some public domain flas (fla is the format the flash IDE saves the projects in, the graphics and such, can contain script, too), but that's a proprietary format and you can't open it anywhere else.
while it's possible to make an swf entirely in script and loading things like graphics into it, it's not exactly convenient and i imagine having to learn like this would be extremely frustrating. maybe KineticFusion, a swf to XML compiler/decompiler could be of some help. they have a free-as-in-beer version, but it only understands ActionScript 1 (no typing, no classfiles, interfaces and such). you could, however, experiment with it by dissecting some simple swfs, building your own, and then start compiling AS2 into it with MTASC. i had to google it because i forgot the name, and came across this, maybe they have something of use, too.
debugging without the flash IDE can be difficult, because obviously you can't use their debugger. there are ways of debugging anyway, iirc there was a short discussion about it on the mailing list. check the archives or just subscribe and ask -- i think there might be more people interested in avoiding the macromedia IDE completely, but so far pretty much everybody using MTASC has a strong background in AS2 development and access to the flash IDE when needed.
MTASC is an open source ActionScript 2 compiler. of course it's not an IDE, but you can use, say, Eclipse with it.
on the development side, there's MTASC, an open source ActionScript 2 (typing, classes...) compiler. lot's of programs can export swfs for graphics to go with the code you write with it.
no, it's not reasonable. just because you don't vote, it doesn't mean you don't get a president.
it's like those weird book clubs, where they just send you some crap other people buy if you don't order something each quater year.
no, in the most important election of your lifetime there only will be the votes of nine supreme court judges a couple weeks later.
this is not to say people shouldn't vote. please, do. even if you live in a state that leans strongly towards one candidate, we non-US citizens could still give you credit for the popular vote should bush win.
you make backups on the blanks for music that have the GEMA fee added to their price? i pay 35 cents for my data cd blanks, and they come in cases.
besides, GEMA is a completely different organisation (distributes money to musicians), and has nothing to do with the GEZ (collects the fees for public broadcasting).
I'll also have to pay for my computer I certainly don't use to watch public broadcasting tv
the idea behind the fees -- for computers or not -- is to guarantee the existance of an independent news coverage. this is always nice to have, but the important thing is that it's there when there are no alternatives left. think of it as a fee for your independent media insurence (hey, that's pretty clever. that's how they should advertise it, not those incredibly stupid ads they run now. i'd better trade mark it, so i can cash in when they get the idea).
On top of that, not only do I have to pay, but every frigging company with a internet connection will have to pay the fee for every computer connected to the net, this is just insane.
do they? i thought they pay for a bulk license, and often pay for tv and radio anyway.
that said, i don't like the idea either. i don't watch tv, and i have no radio. i do, however, watch the evening news over the net. it's 300kb/s, so it goes well on full screen.
of course, now that i have to pay my independent media insurence (think positive) anyway, i certainly expect them to further expand their news and cultural offerings on the web. i'll be officially part of their audience then, and i demand something for my money.
they have sent up private amateur radio satellites into earth orbit for years using some spare space in ESAs arianes since 1980.
they're a rather large group of scientists who work on the project for free in their spare time.
here are some infos in english (and german)
afaik, the dictatorship of the proletariat is only a preparation for communism.
but still, you're right, it includes a political system that goes with the economic system.
i think you meant to say that the story was a dupe.
unfortunately it is impossible to remember all the racist crap that was said throughout history.
but fyi: my other reply to your revisionist post further up was completely out of memory. i'm german, so i don't need a spell checker to know how to spell "Nationalsozialismus".
do you have any comments on that?
a quick search on him revealed that he tried to differ between "jewish physics" (theroretical) and "arayan physics" (experimental).
he also referred to heisenberg and planck as "white jews".
i'm also pretty sure he would have spelled "Nationalsozialismus" with a "z".
nonsense.
being a member of the "master race" was inherited by "blood".
there were tests based on physical characteristics to determine the percentage of "purity".
as a member of the EU, france must not extradite anyone who could become a subject of capital punishment.
maybe the headline was misleading for people who don't RTFA.
it's about projecting on irregular surfaces with irregular coloring, without expensive technology.